The last decade has been marked by a technological revolution driven by the convergence of the data processing industry with the consumer electronics industry. The effect has, in turn, driven technologies which have been known and available but relatively quiescent over the years. A major one of these technologies is the Internet or Web related distribution of documents, media and files. The convergence of the electronic entertainment and consumer industries with data processing exponentially accelerated the demand for wide ranging communication distribution channels, and the Web or Internet, which had quietly existed for over a generation as a loose academic and government data distribution facility, reached “critical mass” and commenced a period of phenomenal expansion. With this expansion, businesses and consumers have direct access to a virtually infinite number of Web documents. In addition, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which had been the documentation language of the Internet or Web for years offered direct links between pages and other documentation on the Web and a variety of related data sources which were at first text and then images, and now include media, i.e. “hypermedia”. This even further exploded the use of the Web. It was now possible for the Web browser or wanderer to literally spend hours going through document after document and accompanying media events in often less than productive excursions through the Web. These excursions often strained the users' time and resources.
A significant source of this drain is in the Web page, the basic document page of the Web. The handling and downloading of Web documents can be very time consuming. In the case of Web pages, we do not have the situation of a relatively small group of professional designers working out the human factors; rather, in the era of the Web, anyone and everyone can design a Web page. As a result, pages are frequently designed by developers without imaging or graphic skills or, worse yet, they may include media such as video or audio. The value of images and media to a particular user is often far outweighed by their long download time. In addition, there appears to be an increasing amount of advertising on the Web wherein the seeker of information at times has to be subject to “commercials” often in time and resource taxing image formats.
Developers of Web access and browsing systems have been addressing these problems and offering to users options to reduce download times. Some current Web browser systems do permit the user to set his overall operation to download all received Web pages in either the full HTML document mode or in a text only mode. However, the user must preselect the mode for the whole operation. Copending application Ser. No. 08/974,411, C. R. Nielsen et al., filed Nov. 19, 1997, provides the interactive user with the option of preliminary deletion of user selected files, such as image or animation files, from downloaded received Web pages. Other presently available implementations for downloading Web documents do offer the user the option of operating in a normal mode where both text and images are downloaded, or in an overall text-only mode where all received Web documents are downloaded in a text-only mode. In addition the above-referenced, copending application, DYNAMICALLY OPTIMIZING THE DOWNLOADING OF WORLD WIDE WEB HYPERTEXT DOCUMENTS AT RECEIVING DISPLAY STATIONS, G. McBrearty et al. Ser. No. 09/627,225 discloses optimizing downloading time by automatically switching the Web document downloading into a text-only mode when the downloading time exceeds a predetermined time.